Now the noisy, rambunctious presidential campaign is over and the crunch time has arrived, voters in this vibrant democracy of 23 million are going to the polls to exercise their right of choosing the nation's top leader for the next four years at a critical time and historic moment.

Several decades down the road, historians may regard Taiwan's 2012 election as a referendum on an all-important yet contentious issue — the “1992 Consensus” — a catchword that either threatens to tear this nation apart or promises to pull it together, because it concerns national identity.

James Soong is back, and with a vengeance. What he sees, rightly or not, is an island where “the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” He feels compelled to right the wrong.

Just before turning 90, Jacob Ma (馬克任) passed away quietly at his home in Long Island, New York, after more than 60 years of an illustrious career in journalism, blazing a trail through a tumultuous era across the Pacific and lighting the way for a younger generation of aspiring journalists.

I'm sure few people in the East, or even outside Canada, have ever heard the name of Jack Layton, a Canadian politician and opposition leader who died last week in Toronto and was honored by an unusual state funeral.

Comet Shih (a.k.a. Kermin 施克敏), a pre-eminent journalist and diplomat, would have been 75 years old this week had he been still with us. His passing in August, 2010, in southern California, struck me virtually like a bolt from the blue because he had always been hale and hearty.

Now it appears that no news is good news for the United States, or at least good news is hard to come by nowadays. S&P has downgraded U.S. debt prospect. Government teetered on the verge of default. On Wednesday, U.S. President Obama released a “long form” of his birth certificate to quell a poisonous fire fueled by persistent rumors that he was born outside the United States. The news made international headlines.

A new buzzword, Sputnik Moment, risks becoming a cliche for overuse by such VIPs as U.S. President Barak Obama, U.S. energy secretary Steven Chu and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. But in my memory it remains as fresh today as it was more than half a century ago.

The calamitous events unfolding daily at Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant have rekindled a long-dormant issue at a politically-sensitive moment in Taiwan: should this Asian industrial dynamo get rid of all its nuclear power plants to become a “nuke-free country?”